Page 20 of Wedding Night In The King's Bed
Where some part of him insisted she belonged. Even now.
And nothing had changed, even though everything had.
She was sleek and glorious, lush and magic.
He could not stop himself. He was not sure he wished to try.
And she looked at him as if she wanted to murder him, but she pressed her mouth to his instead.
As if they had always been at war.
As if they always would be.
As if a war like this was his true birthright.
They came together in a fury, there on the floor of his bedchamber, that quilt and his clothes only pushed aside so he might thrust inside her again and again and again.
But he couldn’t tell if she cried out or he did when that wildfire between them burned them whole.
Only that both of them were lost.
CHAPTER FIVE
AT FIRST HELENE thought that it would be all right.
They would have to talk it all through, of course. They would have to unpack whatever it was that had made him hurl accusations at her like that, and it would likely be an unpleasant discussion given how raw he seemed.
But she was, at heart, an optimist.
After all, she’d been raised on a steady diet of fairy tales.
And as they lay there in a pile of his clothes, sprawled out across that quilt, she tried to focus her gaze on the ceiling far above, festooned with near-operatic moldings. She felt she could relate to the feeling of a good aria, as she tried to catch her breath.
She told herself that surely it wouldn’t feel even better than it had before—and last night had been truly spectacular—if it was all going to go horribly wrong.
But it turned out that she was wrong about that. Because even though she’d managed her father’s moods for most of her life, she wasn’t prepared for Gianluca.
“Are you ready to—” she began when he stirred beside her, then stuttered over the rest of her sentence when he pinned her with that dark gaze of his. “T-talk now?”
“About what?” he asked, though the question was clearly rhetorical. “What else can be said about this travesty?”
Maybe, she admitted to herself privately, the trouble here was that she wasn’t used to feeling quite so vulnerable.
Gianluca stormed away, leaving the travesty that was her behind. Naked and reeling and on a quilt on the floor, still trying to find meaning in the moldings. Helene sat up gingerly, not sure that she’d expected something quite so swift and overpowering and brutally, wonderfully sensual.
Then again, she also hadn’t expected to be called a liar who had broken Fiammettan law because she had enjoyed her wedding night.
“A subject they really should have covered at the Institut,” she said out loud, mostly to see if she could still speak—or if that lump in her throat that she was trying to pretend wasn’t growing had taken over entirely.
She climbed up off the floor. Then it took some doing to pull up that quilt after her and wrap it around herself once again. But she could hear her mother’s cheerful voice in her head.
“But of course we do the hard things the same way we do the easy, mon chou. One step at a time, that is all. One little step and then the next.”
Helene thought that it was possible that if she allowed herself to stop going one step at a time, that terrible vulnerability that yawned open inside her might consume her, and she had no idea what might become of her then. Because she had planned for so many different outcomes, but not this one.
She had not expected to like him so much. She had not expected to want to throw herself into this marriage the way she had. It had all seemed charmed, if she was honest with herself now. As if her mother had been looking after her all this time and had sent her a King Charming to make good on all those happy-ever-after stories she’d told when Helene was little.
Maybe Helene should have remembered that the focus of an Institut graduate was never happiness, but harmony.